CD Projekt spent a year-and-a-half designing Geralt for The Witcher

CD Projekt Red’s Tomasz Gop has said it was important for the team to only only emphasize player freedom with The Witcher 2, but to also have a “clearly-defined” character in Geralt.

Speaking in an interview with Gamasutra, Gop said that the game the team “always wanted to do,” involved telling stories, and it took the team over a year to come up with the concept of the main character.

“I don’t know if you know this, but we spent a lot of time, way before we did The Witcher 1, choosing the main hero,” he said. “After being really inspired about doing the books, we were thinking about doing the game about some other Witcher, not exactly the same guy, so we took like a year and a half designing his look, designing his gameplay features, and so on and so on and so on.

“And after that, it was like a week when we tried to prototype things, we had seen it, we had thought about it. ‘No, it has to be Geralt. Sorry.’ If you want to have a character that’s cool to play, it has to be this guy. It all changed within days.

“I don’t think it’s a problem [combining a defined story with player freedom], because if you think about it and if you weigh everything, you have a really solid hero where you can create personality, and still be able to give a lot of freedom to players

“It’s just a matter of, where do you invest your work? We invest lots of it in the story. Other people have to share, split it between character and story, and that’s okay as well. It’s just, you know, we have to make sure the story is good enough to draw everybody.”